Back Pain? Headache? It May be a Communication from Your Internal World
Image by Jorge Franganillo/Unsplash
Do you ever experience any of the following: fatigue, headaches, back pain, sudden changes in your heart rate, nausea, dizziness, stiff, sore or aching muscles? If so, that means you are human, because to experience a myriad little aches and pains is a fundamental part of living in the all-too-frail, flesh-and-blood body that transports us through our lives. There is also a vast range of possible causes for these symptoms, from viral infections to hormonal changes, arthritis to the degenerative effects of ageing (with which I am becoming annoyingly familiar).
Although, as an internal family systems (IFS) therapist, I am constantly fascinated by and on the lookout for different parts of people’s psyches, I often say to my clients that not everything is about parts. But I also know that parts communicate with us in all sorts of – often strange and unexpected – ways. Most obviously, they communicate by speaking, which we hear as thoughts. For example, your Critic may berate you with all sorts of harsh and unfair stuff, which you hear as self-critical thoughts. Your parts also use images, giving you little flashes of imagery from the past, or projecting into possible future experiences. And parts use memories, especially traumatic or upsetting ones, to communicate their experience directly to you. A six-year-old part may jolt you with a memory of your birthday at that age, when your mum mistakenly invited the class bully, who said something horrible to you when the adults left the room and ruined your special day.
It’s not all negative – parts can share joyful, positive and happy thoughts and good memories too. The same goes for emotions, which can be negative (anxious, lonely, ashamed) or positive (excited, proud, delighted) depending on the situation. Here’s where we enter slightly weird territory, so bear with me – Dick Schwartz, founder of IFS, says your parts can talk to you through dreams and nightmares. And this does make sense, if you think about it, because your parts exist in your unconscious mind, which is the source of nighttime adventures, whether they be lovely or scary.
Speaking through your body
It took me a while to get my head around this, but I now understand that parts communicate somatically too, through your body. Some of this is easier to process than other aspects, like the way your heart beats faster when you are anxious, those butterflies in your stomach if you’re nervous or tense muscles in your chest, neck and shoulders when you’re stressed. These are the somatic expression of emotions in your body – and in the IFS model, many of these emotions are felt by different parts of you, like that six-year-old who got bullied on her birthday. Hopefully that’s easy to digest.
But a whole range of experiences – especially in the murky territory of medically unexplained symptoms – can be seen as parts-related. Headaches, dizziness, muscular tension, fatigue and musculoskeletal pain can all be communications from your parts. Let me give you an example. Imagine that Stephen comes to see me for treatment, suffering from chronic stress, as well as a whole host of weird and wonderful physical symptoms. He also has insomnia and finds it impossible to switch off. Stephen works in corporate law and often does 16-hour days, sometimes pulling all-nighters when his team is especially swamped. ‘That’s just how it is in my world,’ he tells me ruefully, ‘everyone works super-hard.’
But Stephen is not a robot and his health suffers. He is also unusually sensitive, which he fights to mask in the dog-eat-dog corporate environment, so has to suppress a range of intense emotions as he struggles through long, gruelling days. When we start working with his parts, as well as the demanding ones who drive him on day after day, we meet some young parts who hate his job, feel exhausted and upset all the time and desperately want him to find less-demanding work. Because he wilfully ignores these parts, they have no option but to communicate via his body, giving him regular migraines and fatigue so overwhelming he has to call in sick and spend the day in bed.
An Evidence-based theory
Stephen struggles to accept that these physical experiences are anything to do with his mind, or inner system of parts, until I get him to read about the seminal study in 2013 which studied the impact of IFS on people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The study found that IFS not only reduced depression and increased self-compassion in a majority of participants, it also helped with their pain and physical function. Stephen eventually buys into the idea, we work with his parts and also help him find a less-intensive job, and both his mental and physical health improve dramatically.
Again, it’s important to emphasise that not all pain, illness or physical symptoms are psychological or related to your parts. And I am in no way saying these experiences are ‘all in your head’. It just makes sound, scientific sense that you are a complex mind-body system – medical professionals, neuroscientists and psychologists increasingly understand that these systems are not separate and distinct, but interconnected in a million tiny ways. Mind affects body and body affects mind, over and over, every second of your life.
That’s why IFS, like all of the cutting-edge, trauma-focused therapies, work at every level of what makes you, you: your mind, brain, body and nervous system. Only through this kind of holistic approach can trauma therapists like me help you find healing, especially if you have been through traumatic experiences in your life.
I hope these ideas are helpful for you – and if you are experienced pain or illness right now, for any reason, sending you warm, healing thoughts.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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